How do modern guns work?
Different firearms run different types of ammunition for a variety of purposes.
Instead of bullets, shotguns can fire cartridge shells that are filled with a variety of pellets, or individual metal slugs.
As such, shotguns are weapons that eschew long-range accuracy for a deadly, but short-ranged, area of effect blast.
Rifles fire individual bullets that are normally fully metal, although there are a range of rounds such as tracer, soft-point, and rubber that serve different purposes.
The “rifling” (a series of spiraling grooves) in a rifle’s barrel gives the projectile spin as it exits the barrel, and allows the projectile to travel large distances and remain stable in flight. It is the rifling in the gun’s barrel that makes rifles for an accurate and long-ranged weapon.
Rifles can fire their rounds in semi-automatic or automatic mode. Owing to recoil affecting accuracy and barrel overheating, rifles are rarely used to provide sustained automatic fire. Machine guns are used for that purpose.
Like rifles, pistols have a number of different bullets available to them for different uses.
Unlike rifles, however, pistols lack rifling in their barrels.
Coupled with smaller, less powerful projectiles, handguns are generally not very accurate weapons, and have poor range and stopping power.
